Grammy Award For Best Female Pop Vocal Performance

The Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance is the latest in a series of awards recognizing superior vocal performance by a female in the pop category, the first of which was presented in 1959. The award goes to the artist. Singles or tracks only are eligible.

The awards have quite a convoluted history:

  • From 1959 to 1960 there was an award called Best Vocal Performance, Female, which was for work in the pop field
  • In 1961 the award was separated into Best Vocal Performance Single Record Or Track and Best Vocal Performance Album, Female
  • From 1962 to 1963 the awards from the previous year were combined into Best Solo Vocal Performance, Female
  • From 1964 to 1968 the award was called Best Vocal Performance, Female
  • In 1966 there was also an award for Best Contemporary (R&R) Vocal Performance - Female
  • In 1967 the award from the previous year was combined with the equivalent award for men as the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary (R&R) Solo Vocal Performance - Male or Female
  • In 1968 the previous award was once again separated by gender, with the female award known as called Best Contemporary Female Solo Vocal Performance
  • In 1969, the awards were combined and streamlined as the award for Best Contemporary-Pop Vocal Performance, Female
  • From 1970 to 1971 the award was known as Best Contemporary Vocal Performance, Female
  • From 1972 to 1994 the award was known as Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female
  • Since 1995 it has been awarded as Best Female Pop Vocal Performance

The award will be discontinued from 2012 in a major overhaul of Grammy categories. From 2012, all solo performances in the pop category (male, female, and instrumental) will be shifted to the newly formed Best Pop Solo Performance category.

Years reflect the year in which the Grammy Awards were presented, for works released in the previous year.

Read more about Grammy Award For Best Female Pop Vocal Performance:  Recipients, Category Facts

Famous quotes containing the words award, female, pop, vocal and/or performance:

    The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.
    Robert Graves (1895–1985)

    The climacteric marks the end of apologizing. The chrysalis of conditioning has once for all to break and the female woman finally to emerge.
    Germaine Greer (b. 1939)

    Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.
    W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)

    With sweet May dews my wings were wet,
    And Phoebus fir’d my vocal rage;
    He caught me in his silken net,
    And shut me in his golden cage.

    He loves to sit and hear me sing,
    Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
    Then stretches out my golden wing,
    And mocks my loss of liberty.
    William Blake (1757–1827)

    The way to go to the circus, however, is with someone who has seen perhaps one theatrical performance before in his life and that in the High School hall.... The scales of sophistication are struck from your eyes and you see in the circus a gathering of men and women who are able to do things as a matter of course which you couldn’t do if your life depended on it.
    Robert Benchley (1889–1945)